3-11-14 meteorologist says great lakes ice coverage won't necessarily affect spring temps

A National Weather Service meteorologist says the historic Great Lakes freeze-over won’t necessarily affect spring weather as some have suggested.  As of today more than 90 percent of the surface of the Great Lakes was covered in ice, which is a pretty rare thing.  Some meteorologists have said the freeze-over will impact how fast we warm up.  But National Weather Service meteorologist Denny Van Cleve says the

statistics don’t back that up.  "I did a search of recent years that we had similar freeze overs in the Great Lakes and surprisingly there's not much of a long term correlation in terms of how overall temperatures were compared to how frozen the lakes were,"  Van Cleve told AM 1170 WFDL's Between the Lines program.

Van Cleve says the good news is the heavy ice cover will mean higher lake levels this summer.  In 1979, the ice cover on the Great Lakes was 94.7 percent, the largest ever recorded by scientists sinc 1963, the year they started keeping track of Great Lakes ice coverage.